Obama's report card on education

President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign boasts in a recent TV spot that his national education policy borrows from his personal academic success: It can be chalked up to hard work and student aid.

Even conservatives can’t find too much fault with the administration’s education record. “President Obama has been much more reform-minded than any Democratic president before him. He really has co-opted the Republicans on many of their key education positions,” said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an educational think tank, and a research fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution.

Story Continued Below

Since taking office more than three years ago, Obama has prioritized education, pushing elementary and secondary education reform, helping states avoid George W. Bush-era school mandates and expanding federal financial aid for college students.

He also funneled $100 billion to the states in the 2009 stimulus and has been slowly increasing Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s discretionary budget — efforts that have reaped bipartisan support, appealed to young voters and promoted his personal story.

The Obama camp gives the president high marks. Education is “definitely an area where we feel like the president has made a great deal of progress and it’s something he’s very proud of,” said James Kvaal, the Obama campaign policy director who formerly worked on higher education policy in Duncan’s department and for the National Economic Council.

Here’s a rundown of Obama’s educational initiatives and how they’re ranked by education experts:

Race to the Top

The 2009 stimulus bill poured cash into the states, and while most of the money went toward keeping teachers in the classroom as states cut back, $4.35 billion went to a program that’s since had an outsize effect: the Race to the Top initiative.

Appealing to competitive instincts, the Race to the Top gets states to vie for funding by putting forward the best plans for educational reform.

“With a relatively small amount of money, the Obama administration has gotten states to seriously look at education reform,” said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat whose state was awarded $119 million over four years in the first round of the competition.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia won grants for setting out the best plans for boosting college and career readiness, developing data systems to track students, recruiting and rewarding good teachers and principals, and turning around struggling schools.

But the impact has been far wider. In all, said Cynthia Brown, vice president for education policy at the Center for American Progress, “over 30 states changed their policies to make themselves more competitive” for the grants and that has translated into reform even in the states that didn’t win.

“Running a competition was an extremely creative way to get states looking at reform,” Brown said.